Passed at GUCU branch meeting Monday 28 February 2022
This branch notes:
- By Monday 28 February, affected academic staff members in History and English & Creative Writing and professional services staff across the college will be asked to submit their completed Skills Match Questionnaires (SMQs)
- Following this, affected staff will be notified of their SMQ ‘score’ on Monday 7 March, ahead of dismissal notices that are due to be sent out on Friday 25 March for the Academic Portfolio Review (APR) and Monday 25 April for the Professional Services Blueprint (PSB)
- Goldsmiths’ Senior Management Team (SMT) have refused to reduce the number of proposed redundancies, despite savings made from another round of the Voluntary Severance Scheme (VSS), vacancy savings, and improved student recruitment and retention figures
This branch believes:
- Following SMT’s rejection of all counter-proposals put forward during the Stage 1 collective consultation process, there have been a number of inconsistencies across the Stage 2 individual consultation process. These include:
- Lack of attendance from a member of the Recovery Team, despite this being an essential part of the meeting so that staff can ask questions about the SMQ process
- APR Stage 2 meetings have been scheduled for 50 minutes, whereas PSB Stage 2 meetings have been scheduled to last only 30 minutes
- A large number of individual consultation meetings scheduled within the last few days before the deadline – including meetings scheduled for after 5pm – that leave little time for affected staff to organise union representation and in turn complete the SMQ before the deadline
- The selection criteria for the SMQs remains unclear, particularly in relation to future involvement with the Connected Curriculum; how can staff be clear about the college’s strategic priorities that they will be judged against, when the content of the Connected Curriculum has not yet been published
- A continued lack of detailed equalities data relating to the Recovery Programme and an ongoing inability to evidence that ‘due regard’ has been taken under the Equalities Act 2010, before any decisions are taken
- A failure to provide an updated EIA for Stage 2 processes in the APR, as well as an updated EIA for the PSB that acknowledges how the college will mitigate against equalities impacts, in light of the recent changes to the proposed centralised teams
- With regards to the direct matching and ring fencing of posts, there has been a lack of transparency and clarity around how these processes and the grading of roles were undertaken in relation to Higher Education Role Analysis (HERA)
- In pressing ahead with redundancy processes as part of the APR and PSB, SMT have failed in their statutory obligation to minimise the number of compulsory redundancies, and in doing so are failing staff and students
- SMT’s timeline for redundancies gives our union branch a small window of time in which to escalate our action, and stop the redundancies before the dismissal notices are sent out
This branch resolves:
- To take 8 days of strike action across the following dates:
- Wednesday 16 – Friday 18 March
- Monday 21 – Friday 25 March
- To discuss the potential for joint strike action with Goldsmiths Unison across these 8 days
- To move immediately to request approval to reballot our members, in order to extend our mandate for industrial action beyond Tuesday 3 May
- To initiate a marking boycott from the end of the spring term
- To restate our current position that both campus trade unions are prepared to enter into ACAS negotiations with SMT, provided that the current timeline for redundancies and restructuring is immediately paused